


Moonshine

by geckoholic



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Desert Legends, F/F, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 07:25:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10212497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/pseuds/geckoholic
Summary: She never knows her father, and some people say it was the moon itself, fallen from heaven for just one night to put a child in her mother's belly with hair as white as any of its stars.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [juliettdelta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliettdelta/gifts), [redcandle17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redcandle17/gifts).



> Based on your drawing [Wasteland Witch](http://indiasierrabravo.tumblr.com/post/152348257052/inktober-day-26-wasteland-witch), and written as a gift from your friend, who won me in the charity auction. I hope it's a nice surprise! 
> 
> Beta-read by lustyjustice. Thank you!! ♥ All remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> Title is from "The Afterlife" by Bush.

They say she was born under the stars. A cold winter night in the desert, not a single cloud anywhere in sight, the moon in full bloom. That is not, in itself, anything special. There are more people than there are buildings still standing, so most children out here in the wasteland will be welcomed into this world with the sun or moon and stars as their witnesses. Her birth, however, happened in the eye of a storm. They say the weather ceased, and that the wind quieted down, for as long as it took her to be delivered from her mother's womb. They say it was magic, witch craft really, that the women in her family have always been something else, something other. _Different_ , said with hues of veneration and dread and sneer in equal measure. Man fears that which he does not know. Women who can command the heavens and pry their survival from the desert all on their own, that, yes, that is surely fearsome. 

Her mother carries her small body bound to her chest in ratty old cloth, and for the first few years of her life that is all she knows. The two of them take what they need from an environment that miraculously supports them when it seems set on killing all else, and during the night, they converse with the moon and the stars. She doesn't have a name, for she does not need one; there are only the two of them, and she is the daughter. That is all she is. That is all she has to be. She never knows her father, and some people say it was the moon itself, fallen from heaven for just one night to put a child in her mother's belly with hair as white as any of its stars. They said the same thing when her mother was born, and her grandmother before that. She is almost sad when her mother tells her that isn't true; tells her that one day, she will feel her body yearning to carry another life within itself, to bring another servant of the moon into this world. That she will wait for her next blood and in the next village she passes, she will take a lover and she will mount him under the stars, and he will give her a child, one as pure and perfect and precious as herself. 

She sits between her mother's legs, propped against her belly, and together they look up at the clear night sky while her mother chants and wails and sings, and the sky listens. Every so often, her mother will pray for a village they passed during the day just as fiercely as she prays for herself and her child. When they pass again weeks or months later, word will have carried about an unexpected bloom, about a new well or the end of a drought. Never does her mother claim credit; never does she ask thanks or even acknowledgment. The people will whisper regardless, of the moon witch that may relieve their suffering or curse them, entirely on a whim. She never knows her mother to curse anyone, but man cannot understand altruistic gifts to a stranger in need, much less during times like these. 

Man _does_ understand cruelty and pain and suffering; everyone understands those things. They are woven in the very core of every human being, and that is what costs her mother her life, in the end. Their bodies painted with white, they scream and they holler and they paint the sand red with her mother's blood. Her last breath is taken at noon, as far as she can be from the midnight moon that she loves and that loves her back so fiercely, and so it cannot offer its protection. She cries over her mother's dead body, cries for the moon and the stars, but they cannot answer when she is drawn away and put in chains and thrown onto the back of a beast made entirely of metal, breathing smoke and howling louder than a desert lion. 

 

***

 

She sits in the belly of a large mount of stone for longer than she can wrap her head around, too young to comprehend that the life she knew will never be returned to her. There is no one to explain. They speak a language she doesn't quite understand and they don't know how to answer when she asks why the moon abandoned her and if it has taken her mother to the sky, to listen to her prayers as another one of its stars. Soon she realizes that they don't care too much either; these people do not serve the moon. They do not rely on it's power and benevolence. They think they can tame the desert and force it to sustain them. She doesn't think she wants to tell them otherwise. May they die of thirst and hunger, convinced they know better. This is when she first gets a name – the Dag, the other, the one that isn't right in the head and speaks to things that will never answer. She doesn't care; she keeps praying regardless. 

She keeps praying until it dawns on her that maybe the moon doesn't love her as much as it loved her mother, for it does not seem to want her back. It does not free her, and it does not nurture her. For the first time since the day she was born, she learns what it feels like to be so hungry her belly cramps, so thirsty her lips are dry and chapped and she tastes copper when she runs her tongue over them. 

But she lives. A child without a mother, shaking with fright when her first blood arrives and she knows she will not be able to roam the desert and hear the moon calling and gift it its next humble servant. She knows, with sudden and painful clarity, that any new life she would carry in this prison will not have her white hair. It will not hear the desert whisper to her like she does, both of them led by the moon like it does the tides of the sea, a peaceful and prosperous co-existence. 

She is made a wife to the Immortan a short while later, and that knowledge becomes a reassurance. No son, no daughter of his will ever be able to converse with the moon. But the moon must have a servant, and it is her who must carry it into the world and teach it their old ways, and therefore this is not her fate. She can see the stars again; can see them through the ceiling of the iron cage she now shares with another young woman. They give her strength. They keep her from crying every time she is taken to the small room in which they sleep, and in which the Immortan attempts to force her body into giving him another heir. 

_This is not her fate._ There is another life waiting for her, a better life, and all she has to do is bide her time and endure her torture and trust that the moon has not abandoned her yet. 

 

*** 

 

Her fellow prisoner, she learns, is named Angharad. Her crib stood in one of the nearby villages, the fourth daughter of the man who called himself its ruler, and he bartered her away for fuel and bullets to envelop another village in war and tear whatever riches they might possess from their hands. Angharad knows the legend of the desert witch, and in the beginning she is fearful of the white hair and the way she speaks; her eyes grow large with apprehension whenever she glances at the moon and the stars during the night and chants her prayers, low and humble. She is not demanding to be saved, she will wait, but she will also remind them of her continued existence. She is alive, and still willing to serve the moon with all that she is when the time is right.

Their cage is filled with more beautiful birds. Some of them stay, others are around for so short a time that she does not even bother memorizing their names. Bearing the fruit of a union with a body as rotten as the Immortan's carries its risks, and not all can survive. Those that can’t often die in agony, screaming with the pain of trying to bring a child into this life that was never meant to draw breath and walk the desert sand in the first place. The only prayers she allows herself are for her body to reject his seed, and they appear to be heard; month after month, she bleeds, and he yells and raves and calls her broken, calls her an abomination, but her belly stays flat. 

And the moon grants her another gift, one she did not wish nor pray for, but that she welcomes all the same. Her name is Toast, and she is a bastard child of the bullet farmer. Her mother did not teach her about love, had no use for worshiping anyone other than the moon and its stars. No, that was Angharad, speaking to her while they lay in their beds, their fingers entwined, grateful neither of them had received a visit that night. She told her of yearning and passion, of the way intercourse is supposed to feel, not a feared duty but a cherished joy, and it sounds like a fairytale. 

That is, until it comes true. 

The first time they meet, Toast eyes her with suspicion, squinting, frowning. Eyes her the same way every man and every woman has ever looked at the desert witches, except she is not fearful, and she does not stay away. She sticks close, and it is as if she seeks to understand that which is alien to her. She seeks her out when she chants, and she listens, and she knows better than to ask for an explanation, to have these prayers fitted into something she can wrap her head around. 

They kiss in the main room, under the stars, and it is the only thing that has ever felt right in this prison, in this stone fortress, robbed of her free will and the right to decide over even her body. They take back that freedom together; mouths on pebbled nibbles and fingers snuck underneath the teeth of the chastity belts, rough kisses and gentle touch, fulfillment neither of them have ever known, and after, curled in each other’s arms while their bodies quiet down. Now when Toast looks at her there is a different kind of reverence in her eyes, and though or while she still laughs and calls her odd and rolls her eyes when nothing she utters makes sense, it carries fondness and not scorn. 

But in a place like this, happiness cannot last, and soon she finds herself weeping in her new lovers arms when she doesn't bleed for a cycle, and then another. She almost loses her faith, then; looks up at the sky every single night, but does not chant or pray, no matter now much Toast nudges her and how worried she looks when she asks her not to ever give up hope. 

That is, of course, when her prayers are answered. The moon sends them Furiosa, and she takes them away under the sheltering cloak of the night, huddled together in the belly of a metal beast until the morning comes, and longer still. But she has been waiting for her salvation for so long, and if this is their chance, her way back into the desert and towards a life that is led and guided by the moon, then she can endure this too. 

 

*** 

 

The following nights they spend under the stars in the desert, gazing upon what's waiting to devour them again beyond the horizon, and even though no one expects coherency and sense from her, she makes an effort not to let the smile on her face spread too wide. Maybe they'll all die out here. Maybe they'll be dragged back to their gilded cage and nothing will have changed in the end. But for now she can feel the moon overhead like it's a hand on her shoulder, a smile on her mother's face, the embrace of a long lost friend. She grabs Toast's wrists and threads their fingers together, points their joined hands towards the sky, and she doesn't need words to explain. Toast follows her line of sight, and it's a quiet introduction, wedged in between fear and fighting, but it is mutually understood; she has always belonged to the moon and now she belongs to Toast too.

On the next day, she meets another part of her destiny, another legacy to carry on. It might not make sense at first glance, a child of the moon taking on the task of caring for that which needs daylight and warmth to grow, but see, the sun and the moon both want the same thing. They want to nurture whatever creatures depend on them; they provide, and one does not exclude the other. And besides, plants grow under the cloak of the night just as much as they do under the day's warming light. Everything that lives needs them both. Synergy; the circle of life, begun anew with every sunrise. 

After they return to the citadel, she wanders to the garden with the bag of seeds in her arms, and she looks over each and every satchel, she reads the worn old scribbled notebooks with instructions for helping them to prosper. There is a life growing in her too, one that she tries to ignore, so instead of marveling at her growing belly, she marvels at the brittle saplings that sprout from her seeds, breaking the through the earth, then growing ever taller, some to bear fruit, others to heal.

Her own child is born under the bright midday sun, and he draws his first breath in the arms of another, same as his second, and his third, and all that follow. She never touches him. She gives him away, because who his father is might not be his fault, but it's also not hers. It would not do either of them a favor, if she'd see the Immortan's face in the boy every single day, every single time she looks at him. He does not carry the heritage of the moon either; his eyes are brown, his hair a muddy yellow. He will live a good life, she will make sure, but he will not do so as her son. 

 

***

 

In the years that follow, her life has a simple rhythm. She gets up while the moon is only just making way for the sun in the sky, and cares for her plants during the day. She prays in the twilight and goes to sleep each night in Toast's arms, and she does not waver from the spot they all fought so hard to call theirs. Sometimes it tugs at her, the need to return to the nomadic existence her mother taught her, but she feels she has found her place; she still converses with the moon, and she may cast a spell, murmur an incantation, should she find someone in need. Every now and then, she'll even look at Toast with excitement in her eyes, with the need to walk for as long as her legs may carry her, and they will go together. But they always, always, return. 

It is during one of these excursions that she wakes during the night with a strange pull low in her belly, and sees the fires of a nearby settlement in the dark. She rouses Toast and kisses her once, on the mouth, then smiles. She gets up, and walks over to meet whoever it is the moon has picked for her in that village. He his younger than her, seems spooked and fascinated by her in equal measure, and she makes love to him until the rising sun tickles their skin. Then she returns to Toast, for it is her that her waking hours belong to now, no matter with whom she shared this one night. 

This time, when her body begins to change, letting her and everyone around her know, unmistakably, that she is which child, she vibrates with excitement, eager to meet the daughter she has been waiting to love and guide for as long as she can remember. She sits in the garden, between her plants, one hand on her belly and the other threaded with Toast's, and she tells her unborn heiress about the moon and the witches and her place in this world. That her existence will not be without hardships, but that she will be protected, and she will be loved, and whatever harms her will meet a harsher fate then she herself may ever experience. She talks about the things she will teach her, and how she may want to stay or she may want to wander the desert like so many of their forebears, and it will be her choice, and both will be right. 

 

***

 

Her daughter is born at midnight, during a cold but quiet night, on a blanket under the stars. No one will say that her birth made a storm cease, but that is alright, for instead they will say that the moon itself made sure to end her mother's slavery so she could be born in freedom. 

Because either way, be it the elements or the hand of man, nothing will bring harm to the witches of the moon. The tales of those who try will end in tragedy. Such is the law in the desert; it has been for as long as anyone can remember, and it will be until the end of time.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://lostemotion.tumblr.com).


End file.
